


but darling, i know you too well

by trashyeggroll



Series: the feelin’ is reckless [3]
Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Female Solo, Mel's reaction to Greta opening the door?, Mentions of Jada/Mel, Oral Sex, PWP, Pining, bro i FELT that shit, canon adjacent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2020-01-01 08:28:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18332357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashyeggroll/pseuds/trashyeggroll
Summary: Post 01x17 "Surrender": Frustrated and newly single, Mel returns to her memory from the breakfast table.





	but darling, i know you too well

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuses for this.
> 
> title from "Spell" by Niki

After a particularly action-packed few days, Mel Vera’s bedroom beckoned her with almost physically manifested force, and when the door closed behind her, the weight of an exhausting week seemed to finally slide off her shoulders, leaving her feeling frayed and raw.

With everything going on, she hadn’t had the time nor the headspace to process her hasty breakup with Jada, or why that hadn’t been bothering her as much as it reasonably should have. As much as the memory of Greta’s hand sliding across Niko’s shoulder did, crawling under her skin and scratching across her bones every time her traitorous brain brought it up. In the quiet of her own thoughts, Mel could almost bring herself to admit she felt… relieved. Not that it was over; she hadn’t come close to confronting that thought, yet. Rather, that she could retreat into feeling  _ something _ for  _ someone _ else other than Niko, like a broken finger to distract from a bullet wound. 

Greta seemed nice enough, anyway—a handsome and polite butch with a charming smile who offered to make tea for guests. And Mel  _ hated _ her. 

Shoving the stranger’s crooked grin from her mind, she peeled off her shirt and leggings, throwing them unceremoniously into the corner. The way the clothes slowly floated to the floor didn’t appease her itching arms, however, and in a fit of self-indulgence, she found herself chucking a thick, hardcover book across the room instead. It  _ thwacked _ satisfyingly against her closed door and landed splayed open on the ground, the pages waving like white flags in the face of her tantrum. 

When tears next stung at her eyes, she almost sent her phone sailing too, but instead she slumped onto her bed, facedown and tense. Destroying a $1,000 device wouldn’t do anything to change the true enemy: That she was still helplessly in love with Niko Hamada, the one who was a decorated homicide detective and hated Earl Grey tea, and happened to share a face and voice with Niko 2.0. Greta’s Niko.

Flexing her bandaged hand, she considered their goodbye—terse, suspicious. Neither version of Niko could be fooled, apparently, and that shouldn’t have surprised her. She knew she should’ve had better answers ready for the questions about strange goings on in her life, but whenever she looked up into those big brown eyes, her brain abandoned her, and she came up with incredibly useless things to say instead, like a three-year-old thinking they can get away with something by just denying it. It made her look objectively suspicious.

And maybe her brain had an ulterior motive. The idea that maybe  _ Niko already knew _ made her heart thump anxiously with something adjacent to hope. Harry could do an easy memory spell of course, but given the way two timelines had been going, the doggedly persistent investigator would likely pop right back up in the middle of something at least related to demonic activity. How many times could she reintroduce herself to the unknowing love of her life before losing her mind? Why keep fighting it, anyway? She knew so much more now; she could keep Niko safe, could figure out how to manage her response to knowledge of magic. 

Most of that hope came to a screeching halt when she considered the last necessary question: How would she tell Niko that she, for all intents and purposes,  _ stole _ two years of a life from her, without her consent?

_ Nope. _ That was too much. Mel rolled fitfully onto her back as her phone buzzed with a New York Times notification about the Mueller Report. She skipped that to open Instagram, scrolling mindlessly through her feed for a bit before her finger wandered to that cursed search function… Three letters in, and it was already suggesting Niko’s account, the algorithm itself smugly calling out her frequent visits. It was enough of a thorn to her already sour mood that instead, just to be difficult (in a thought process that in the sober of morning wouldn’t make any sense), she found Greta’s profile instead.

While Niko didn’t post all that much anyway, Greta used her Instagram even less often, but almost all of the photos were of Niko—at a park on the slide, at a concert with glitter shining on her cheeks, sitting on a stool at The Haunt. It was almost discomfiting that Greta herself was in almost none of the pictures, in that sort of unspoken-social-media-rules sort of way. She skipped over the sparse “happy couple” selfies and stopped on a post that she recognized, dated to a few months before Niko and Mel had met in the old timeline. 

Niko, smiling demurely, holding a champagne glass and smiling from what looked like the other side of a fancy restaurant table. The caption said,  _ “She said yes!” _ followed by a series of celebratory emojis that made Mel’s vision blur and chest constrict, almost to the point of pain. 

She quickly backed out and scrolled up a little bit, realizing she was looking at an infrequent, but chronological accounting of how Niko’s life had changed in the rewritten years. The fake glasses had been abandoned around the time she left the police force, and the two recast birthdays were both at the same restaurant as the engagement announcement photograph, rather than the laser tag arena and bowling alley Mel had booked for the corresponding celebrations in her memory.

As her shame rose, she almost exited the app, but tapped through to one more image. Niko, hair tousled, sitting up and holding a coffee mug in a bed with a white comforter pulled up to her bare collarbones. The mug, Mel recognized as one Niko had been holding onto since high school, a hand-painted, undeniably ugly ceramic rendition of Bulbasaur’s head. It wasn’t unpleasant enough to distract her from a practically glowing Niko, though—her face was still a little swollen from sleep, her cheeks flushed and lips puffy and… The caption read,  _ “Sleepy mornings with my queen. Can’t wait to enjoy this every morning for the rest of my life.” _

That  _ did _ hurt. As her throat tightened from the force of it, Mel quickly swiped up on the app and put her phone facedown on the bedside table. She also knew that particular version of Niko. Intimately. She haunted her dreams. 

And now, without the safety net of Jada’s calm presence and distracting hands, Mel’s emotions jettisoned into a fit of rage at herself, at Charity, at Jada, at the Elders… at her mother. The idea that all of this suffering could’ve been avoided with more honest guidance from the people she was supposed to trust the most, aside from Niko and her sisters, was too heavy of a thought to bear. Letting out several unhappy huffs, she slapped at the corded button for her lamp, darkening the room, and shed her bra and panties before throwing herself under the covers.

Sleep. Sleep would clear away the edges of all this… mess. Come the bright promise of morning, she could live with herself again. 

Yet thirty minutes later, her mind was still doing the equivalent of a gymnastics floor routine, no matter what she tried to think about instead of her ex…es. 

Briefly, she considered going downstairs for a nightcap or five, but decided it was too risky—she was in a prime mood for irresponsible drunk texting. So, after a drawn out battle between her brain and her body, the latter won out, and Mel relented to a different way to calm her nerves; she slipped a hand down her stomach under the covers. Her fingers wandered across the thick curls between her legs and on down to her lower lips, but there she paused, eyes squeezing shut as she tried to focus.

While probably not entirely healthy, Mel’s mind charted a course deeper into an idea, with Jada. Maybe she texted to make sure the whitelighter-witch was okay. Maybe they met in her loft above the tattoo parlor, and maybe that led to a shouting match that culminated in a desperate grab for each other, mouths crashing together. Jada’s strong hands pushing her against the nearest wall. Or maybe a tearful, mutually agreed upon and quiet end, punctuated by gentle kisses as Jada tipped her back in her bed and settled between her knees. 

She wanted heat and anger and longing expressed without words, in hooded-eye looks and scratches and teeth sinking into muscle.  _ I care about you. Am I not enough?  _ And of course:  _ I’m sorry.  _ Except, every time her mind’s eye looked up at Jada, expecting verdant, stormy green, Mel was instead gazing into warm, gentle brown, and thick plaits melted away to free falling, loose curls slicked with sweat to golden skin. The unsaid messages passed back and forth between lips and hands and tongues became,  _ I still love you. I miss you. _

There was no going back from there. Just the hazy, shifting image of the tall investigator made her core pulse, and engines that had been stalling kicked into high gear. Her brain veered immediately to the memory Maggie had so rudely peeked in on at breakfast. It had been a long time since her furtive late night quests for relief had conjured this particular memory, but now her exhausted mind and the insistent throbbing between her legs wouldn’t let it go.

Against all reason, Niko’s text that morning, the one that ultimately led them to the cultist demon, had triggered a memory from the first year of their relationship, when the then-detective had been bedridden for a month after an on-duty knee injury. The wording, down to a letter, had matched a text Niko sent her one day while she’d been teaching, just a simple and somewhat worrying,  _ “Hey can we meet up later? I have a question I think you can help me with.” _

Back then, Mel showed up as soon as she could, about three hours later, and let herself into the apartment as she called out in greeting. 

“I’m in here… still,” Niko’s voice shouted back from the bedroom. 

Somewhat nervous, Mel paused to gather herself and put on a totally-not-worried smile as she rounded the door. “Hey, babe. Right where I left you.”

Reclining in bed all day had not been easy for the increasingly restless detective, who swore by the end of the second week that she’d Internet-sleuthed two new serial killers—but right now, Niko was smiling at her like she was sunrise after a cold night, and relief flooded Mel’s veins.  _ Not a bad “question”, then.  _

“Solve any cold cases today?” she teased, sinking onto the bed near her girlfriend’s hip, a safe distance from the plaster-encased leg propped up on a pillow. “Zodiac Killer?”

“Really need to expand your true crime references,” sighed the taller woman as she reached over to spread her fingers across Mel’s thigh, just enough to ghost along the skin under the hem of her skirt. 

The subsequent firm squeeze made Mel’s breath stutter, and she pinned Niko with a sideways look. “Don’t start that…”

“I have an idea.”

_ “Six _ weeks is the doctor’s orders.” Mel tapped a finger on the offending limb. "You are  _ miserable _ being off duty, and I won’t break the rules and risk making it longer.”

“I have… an idea,” repeated Niko in a lower tone. She didn’t move her hand farther up Mel’s skirt, but her other palm patted her lap. “It’s also my question…”

“No!  _ That _ is definitely—“

She cut off as Niko caught one of her gesturing hands, firmly dragging it to her mouth to wrap her lips around first one, and then two fingers, sucking lightly as her tongue massaged the sensitive pads of her fingers. All the blood in Mel’s brain rushed south, and there was no stopping the strangled groan that escaped her throat when those lips pulled slowly back, gliding wetly across her knuckles, and then releasing them with a quiet pop. 

“It’s been twenty-six days,” murmured the detective, directing an exaggeratedly longing expression at Mel’s fingers as she kissed each individual knuckle for good measure. 

Summoning her last oxygenated brain cell available for rational thought, Mel managed to hoarsely reply, “What, no minute breakdown?”

“Twenty-five days and nineteen hours, give or take.”

And fuck if it didn’t feel like 84 years to Mel, too. Her resolve was crumbling, but she still needed to make sure they could be safe. “Okay… what’s the grand plan, Hamada?”

Niko scooted her hips down the bed with her good leg and some worried help from Mel, until she was flat on her back. Once she was settled, the taller woman tapped a palm on her chest and smirked.  _ Oh. _

“I promise I won’t move.”

That was good enough for her. With fumbling hands, Mel stood and unzipped her skirt, sliding off her underwear along with it to puddle on the floor. She watched Niko’s eyes darken as they traced her bare legs and hips, but in a final act of protest, Mel climbed back onto the bed without removing her shirt. Before the detective could argue, she leaned down to swallow the words in a kiss, sinking her teeth into that plush bottom lip that had been bothering her since she walked into the room, whether from pouting or sliding wetly against her fingers. Niko’s hands flew to her hips, tugging hard enough that Mel almost lost her balance.

“No,” she warned, pushing the wandering hands away. When Niko huffed and frowned back at her, Mel just shook her head. “If you don’t stay still, we aren’t doing this. And you started it.”

“My arms aren’t—“

“Nope.” She nipped at the detective’s chin, then soothed the command by using her best sweet girlfriend tones for her next words, “And I  _ really _ wanna do this. Please?”

It had the desired effect. Niko groaned and dropped her hands to the mattress.

Satisfied with that response, Mel swung a leg over Niko’s shoulders, holding on to the headboard with two hands as she maneuvered her knees and hips into place. She paused to glance over her shoulder at Niko’s hands, which were gripping the sheets, but still in place, and then lowered herself until she was just hovering out of reach.

This hadn’t always been a position she was comfortable with, not only because of the anxiety thought that she might actually smother someone, but also because it felt more vulnerable than being on her back, somehow—her colonized mind suddenly hyper-conscious of her weight bearing down on her partners, of smells and tastes that became inescapable this way. Niko had diligently worked to change her mind, spending an impressive sum of hours tucked between Mel’s legs, tongue tracing every inch she could reach and lips murmuring endless appreciation against her skin. 

Like now, as her girlfriend sighed a quiet  _ fuck, babe _ that puffed against the slickness coating her inner thigh. Niko’s nearly-black eyes slipped closed, neck arching in a silent plea. A willing supplicant to relief that only Mel could give, as simple a thing as dropping her hips. It sent sparks of anticipation racing up her spine, and though Mel took a dizzying moment to savor the feeling, the thrumming pressure coiling deep in her belly was in no mood for games. She carefully relaxed her thighs until she felt the first warm swipe of the detective’s tongue against her outer lips. 

“S-slow. Really sensitive,” she hissed as her fingers tightened on the headboard. Her girlfriend said something that sounded watery and far away, but somehow her body processed the request—she slid a hand down her belly and opened herself with two fingers in a “V”, drawing a strangled groan from below. 

And it started slow, almost agonizingly so, Niko’s eyes slipping closed as she tilted her chin up and took Mel in her mouth. For all her complaining, the detective seemed content to spend time exploring, tracing her tongue around Mel’s entrance, then dragging up to just under her clit, flicking it lightly. Each lazy stroke sent a bubble of pleasure zipping to the base of her spine, building into a gathering storm, but not quite enough to bring the edge within sight. When she lost the battle of wills and ground her hips down, coating Niko’s chin with her slick arousal, the tall woman moaned, and the vibration had one of her hands dropping to tangle in a fistful of dark brown hair. And then it wasn’t so slow.

Trying desperately not to jostle her injured girlfriend, Mel rocked her hips against Niko’s mouth in a steady rhythm and forced her eyes open. Niko’s were still closed, her brows knitted in concentration as her tongue massaged along the side of Mel’s clit in time with her short thrusts, pressing firmly against the bundle of nerves at the crest of each movement. The air filled with slick, filthy noises, interspersed with gasps and choked groans. Mel’s hips churned faster as she felt her release within reach, the rough pace rubbing her soaked cunt  _ just right _ against Niko’s chin. 

Without slowing the motion of her hips, she tightened her grip on the detective’s hair until her eyes fluttered open, just fiery bits of charcoal in the waning orange light of the evening. And fuck if the ludicrous burst of affection she felt for the woman below her, visible only from the nose up, didn’t hit her square in the chest with the same force as the vibration of Niko’s responding moan jolting through her clit. 

The one-two punch did it, catapulting Mel into an orgasm that had her bearing down hard on her girlfriend’s chin, holding her in place with the hand in her hair. Her muscles seized and released, white heat and relief splashing through her limbs as wetness pulsed out of her, flowing over Niko’s cheeks and dripping down to the pillow. As she leaned back to survey the damage, holding her weight on a shaky arm, she saw Niko’s throat bob—she was  _ swallowing _ , and the revelation simultaneously made Mel’s cheeks burn and her clit pulse harder, more liquid gushing out of her to stain the front of Niko’s hoodie. 

A hazy, heavy feeling settled into her bones, and she had to put both hands back on the headboard to ease herself off of Niko’s face without kneeing or kicking her. The detective’s shining lips were frozen in an “O”, her chest rising and falling rapidly. 

_ That _ had only happened once before, with her girlfriend from her freshman year of college, who had not been pleased, so even as her body kept shuddering with lingering aftershocks, Mel felt a reflexive apology take shape in her mind—but then Niko grabbed her hand, somehow still obediently flat on her back as she announced, “That is the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Mel groaned, leaning away to hide her blush behind her hair, but Niko tugged on the captured wrist until she looked back at her. 

“I’m serious, babe. The main storyline quest for the rest of my life is to make you come like that, in my mouth, as much as possible.”

_ For the rest of my life. _ With previous girlfriends, when this kind of slip up in word choice happened, she could usually brush it off with a strategically-placed, sarcastic,  _ “That’s gay.” _ But nothing happened. Her brain just hummed happily at the suggestion, nodding along.  _ For the rest of my life. _

Something like uncertainty flickered across Niko’s face then, as if she was digesting the meaning of her own words, and Mel quickly shifted her hips back down so she was lying alongside her tall girlfriend. She swallowed the beginning of an equivocation from Niko’s reddened, swollen lips, while her hand slid under the elastic waistband of her sweatpants. Her fingers passed through a patch of curls, and it didn’t take long—Niko’s clit was hard and pulsing, easy to find in the silky wetness that had gathered in her underwear. The knowledge that her girlfriend was this on edge just from tasting her made her puff up with pride, earlier embarrassment forgotten, and she skipped over any thought of teasing. Two fingertips covered Niko’s slick clit and pressed hard, shifting back and forth directly over where she could feel the sensitive head, and the reaction was as immediate as it was forceful. Niko whimpered and groaned into her mouth as her body tensed, trying to jackknife, but Mel held her hips down with all the strength left in her arm as her fingers continued massaging the pulsing bud until Niko collapsed bonelessly into the mattress. 

Mercifully, they’d managed not to aggravate Niko’s healing knee with their activities, and Mel remembered a very relaxed evening of ordering pizza in, cuddling and card games, and watching  _ Parks and Rec _ until they fell asleep. Back when she had the time and freedom to stay the night, to wake up without anywhere to be, sore and satisfied, to a softly snoring detective. And make her coffee in that stupid mug. 

_ For the rest of my life. _

It had been years ago now since that afternoon, the details of the day fraying with the natural fade of memory, but it was still enough to have Mel arching in her bed, clenching around nothing and biting her lip until it stung to avoid alerting the whole house to the relief burning through her limbs. When the pulsing afterglow faded, she sat up to wipe her hands on a t-shirt from the floor, and her body, though maybe not her mind, felt much more at ease when she settled back against her pillow. It wasn’t what she truly wanted, not even close, but the dose of endorphins had her finally drifting towards sleep, as fitful as she knew it would be. 

**Author's Note:**

> tell me about the messiest wlw relationship thing you've ever done or ask me to stop this madness on tumblr [@trashyeggroll](https://trashyeggroll.tumblr.com/)


End file.
